When creating the placemats for the Martinez, one problem was encountered. The placemat parameters were essentially vanilla, set up for 18 ports and 14 people, and parsing by ps2pdf.com created the placemats as we used on the night without a problem. During preparation however, I did try several options to enhance the placemats, including enabling of /Rays and (separately) enabling of /ShapesInTitles, however in both cases ps2pdf failed to parse the output, with an "internal error" response from the ps2pdf server (perhaps some form of memory error during processing rather than a postscript parsing or syntactic issue).

The current draft of the placemats for the 1970s on Monday 22nd December 2014 has BackgroundTextsGlasses as true, with BackgroundTextsGlassesTexts containing “B+F”. And TastingNotesCirclesBehind is also true.

So the TN sheets have, in effect, two watermarks.

Should the default value of TastingNotesCirclesBehind be changed such that it is false if BackgroundTextsGlasses is true? Comments?

I think the background text works well on the glasses page, and the circles work well as background on tasting notes pages, but the background text on tasting notes is less visually appealing so I would turn that off; my preference for defaults when background text is present would therefore be:BackgroundTextsGlasses as trueTastingNotesCirclesBehind as true
but (the perhaps non-existant, currently):TastingNotesBackgroundTextBehind or BackgroundTextsTastingNotes as false
n.b. note the inconsistency in whether the subset is pre-/post-fixed in the variable naming.

Current defaults/BackgroundTextsTastingNotes BackgroundTextsGlasses def/TastingNotesCirclesBehind {IsDistiller GlassesNumCopies 1 ge and} def
(The IsDistiller bit is because of a set of interlinked bugs in GhostScript and Mac Preview. Don’t ask.)

This is not a democracy. My software; my decision. A vote is not being offered. What is being offered is an opportunity to persuade me, to show me the error(s) of my ways, to guide me to a better course.

• I believe the two watermarks are too cluttered. Daniel likes it because it “recalls the the intricate designs on a banknote”, but these aren’t banknotes, these are TN sheets on which people are meant to be able to write.

• Phil agrees with having just one, but prefers the circles. Typically BackgroundTextsTastingNotes is false. But if it’s true, it must be true for a reason. Maybe we wanted to add “RP” as light flattery of a visiting dignitary, maybe we had some other motivation. The circles are an elegant echo of the glasses sheet, but seem to be merely decorative (being ingratiating is more important).

So I haven’t been persuaded, and there isn’t a clear-cut consensus suggesting that I’ve made an error.

Decision: the default has now been changed to:/TastingNotesCirclesBehind {IsDistiller GlassesNumCopies 1 ge BackgroundTextsTastingNotes not and and} def

Having read your decision with reasoning, it seemed something was missing; in re-reading your original question, I now see what. A follow-on attempt at persuasion for a slightly different solution:

At the moment, the first variable is /BackgroundTextsTastingNotes which when defined puts text on the back of the glasses page. We then argue about whether this should then override the circles or not on the tasting notes pages.

It would seem to make more sense to me that there should be two variables (naming up to you, below just as example) one defining the text for background use on glasses pages, and one defining text for background use on tasting note pages. This allow them to be different, or the same (using a common variable if wanted), so is more flexible and also more explicit for the user. Thus:

I think that would give you the default you desire (changing /BackgroundTextsTastingNotes to a default of false was my preference), while making it much simpler and clearer for the user to modify to obtain desired results, as well as more flexibility.

PhilW wrote:It would seem to make more sense to me that there should be two variables

But there are, and have been since long before this discussion. Defaults are (and have been since long before this discussion):/BackgroundTextsGlasses false def
/BackgroundTextsTastingNotes BackgroundTextsGlasses def(Bolding for emphasis only.)

So they can be different, though by default BackgroundTextsTastingNotes takes the value of BackgroundTextsGlasses. Your suggestion seems to be very similar, except that you want BackgroundTextsTastingNotes to default to false irrespective of the value of BackgroundTextsGlasses. (But if the glasses pages have an “RP” background then surely both should — at least, that’s what I would want to do.)